Video game thread

@Azure Fang  
i kinda gave up on patching the holes on the fort and just made barricades in and out of them, atleast it looks nice

@Officer Hotpants  
I agree, good idea, poor execution.
 
I also think that’s why the Minutemen questline is so terrible, because it was made as a faction to incorporate settlement building. That idea in and of itself can actually be amazing if you implement it properly, but from the looks of things I could swear that the Minutemen were the last faction added into the game to give you a main quest reason to indulge the otherwise mostly frivolous and pointless settlement building.
 
I keep thinking of ways the Minutemen questline could have been done properly, almost like a pseudo minecraft-meets-XCOM experience, where you can build the faction up to be a real powerhouse. Add integration with DLC content, like being able to use Automatrons to supplement your forces and they could easily be as technologically advanced as the Brotherhood of Steel, while also being more numerous and with public support.
 
But no, they didn’t. It honestly feels like all the effort went into the Toaster Lives Matter Single Issue Faction War factions. Actually, most of the real effort feels like it went into the BoS and Institute, the Railroad feel like a third faction added because they wanted a third faction. >.<

@Azure Fang  
@TeamBlueplant  
I just downloaded a Castle Walls mod. It’s a bit rough, but it more or less works.

Fellas, is it normal to blast the Titan A.E. soundtrack while playing No Man’s Sky? I mean after all, I am A COSMIC CASTAWAAAAAAAAY, YEAH!!!
 
@FeatherTrap  
I do have to give them credit one thing regarding factions: they got away from the Good Guy Brotherhood bullshit of Fallout 3 and returned to Brotherhood to its asshole roots. I mean New Vegas technically did that but, you know, Bethesda didn’t immediately re-retcon it when they took over again.

@Officer Hotpants  
The “Good Guy Bullshit” is one of the most overexaggerated complaints I hear about Fallout 3, it’s just a logical continuation of how the Brotherhood were changing as a faction after the events of Fallout 1. Frankly, compared to the Brotherhood of Fallout 2, the Fallout 3 Brotherhood’s changes where really quite modest.
 
The real complaint I have about Fallout 3’s Brotherhood is why are they even there at all? There is no way in hell a chapter that size could logistically feed and maintain their numbers like that crossing the entire US.
 
The only West Coast Fallout faction that could even make it there would be the Enclave. And I’m not actually opposed to the Enclave returning on the East Coast, but Fallout 3 handled them in a way that made it look like they where stronger then ever, despite having their main base of operations being nuked. >.<
 
You know how the BoS are introduced in Fallout 4? At the Cambridge Police station? The Enclave should be like that on the East Coast…or even more likey, a shadow organisation that works through proxies. I the theory that merc companies like Talon and Gunners were being paid by the Enclave to weaken local factions and project influence from the shadows, and I think it could actually be a really great idea if implemented properly.
 
But of course, Bethesda won’t. Because of the overblown backlash to Fallout 3 going back to before they even starting working on the fucking thing, Bethesda seems to be too fucking terrified to develop any of their own interesting ideas, of which they have many. But instead they just want to keep bringing back the Posterboys of Steel, cause it’s just NOT A FALLOUT GAME without them. Apparently. >.<
 
Can the BoS just get killed off already? Their regression as a faction from New Vegas has made them into an actual fucking caricature of themselves. I hate this fucking faction, please kill it off already.

@FeatherTrap  
Railroad is a third faction added because mUsTvIrTuEsIgNaL and to patch up a plot hole in having a free synth in the ship city in F3 (instead of, you know, saying they’re an Institute spy).
 
@Officer Hotpants  
Good guy brotherhood was better because bethesda is not competent enough to write complete assholes dying out (Mojave chapter is one of the last surviving ones, because the rest pissed enough people off for all their techno-hoards to not be enough to avoid getting blasted to smithereens) because they’re idiotic isolationist technohoarders.
 
@FeatherTrap  

Basically, the real cause of BoS and Enclave and supermutants and all other shoehorned things being there. Yes, even after FNV where all those things were basically a footnote, with real conflict being between two post-war factions, and secondary plotline being the conflict between past and present (NCR trying to build pre-war USA, Legion using ancient aesthetics for their raider horde, Courier being unable to go back to unblasted Divide).

@Barhandar  
Please do not bring up Lonesome Road again, and I swear to God if mention “Muh bear and bull” I will use this fucking fat man… >.<  
(I don’t like Ulysses, interesting ideas forced out through the most pretentious Marty Stu antagonist in all Fallout history. That is all :/)
 
 
The real issue with Bethesda Fallout is that they won’t develop what’s already there, instead they keep trying to bring old ideas back to sell people on the idea that they can do Fallout right. And people are right to complain that the Brotherhood being on the east coast doesn’t make sense, the Enclave shouldn’t be stronger after being nuked to oblivion.
 
But unfortunately the internet is a place that sucks at nuance, and legitimate criticism gets blown up into stupid nonsense like “Durr, Brotherhood in Fallout 3 is too nice!!”, even though they hide themselves away in a fortress which they don’t let anyone walk into without proving their worth to them (like in Fallout 1).  
The source of the complaint seems to be that they go around helping people with super mutants and recruit locally. So a continuation of what they decided to do in Fallout 1, because super mutants represent an existential threat to the entire human race…and that they need to replenish their numbers.  
Wow, no fucking shit? A faction with a personnel deficiency in their home territories needs to boost their recruit drive when their on the other side of the fucking country? No fucking shit? >:P
 
And regrettably, that backlash has now left Bethesda too terrified to do anything legitimately interesting to develop the setting and give us new ideas to flesh out this corner of the Fallout world. Instead they’ll just bring back the posterboys again “Look, we fixed them in Fallout 4! They’re better now!”
 
If by “fixed”, you mean you did better then Obsidian did to them in New Vegas then yes, a marginal improvement. Since anything is fucking better then the travesty Obsidian did to them in that fucking game, making them into such a blatant caricature of themselves that they would rather fucking die then make any sensible compromise in the reality of their situation.
 
However Bethesda, you did turn them into a one issue “TOASTER MAN BAD” faction, going back on all the potentially interesting developments from Fallout 3 and making it clear that they are the ultimate obstacle to any creative ideas in your games going forward. I’m shocked that fans like Officer Hotpants consider THAT to be a fucking improvement over Fallout 3. >.<

I’m sorry if I seem like I’m being hostile and attacking people…that’s not what I’m trying to do, I just get very passionate. v.v
 
Thing is, I broadly agree with the consensus of the thread: Fallout New Vegas was the best one, Fallout 4 is fun but has serious problems that make it an unworthy Fallout sequel.
 
But as I said: The internet sucks at nuance. That means a lot of the fine detail is often missed, and it’s created “camps” of Fallout fans. Broadly: the New Vegas faithful that think Bethesda Fallout is utter trash and their game has no real flaws to speak of, and the Bethesda shills who are their dark mirror and apologists for Bethesda.
 
It’s like muh Bear and Bull but in real life. I don’t like either of you because you’re blind to the obvious flaws in your own positions, and I’m gonna conspire with Yes Man to drive both of you out of my fucking desert. >.<

@FeatherTrap  
They don’t want to sell people on the idea of “they can do Fallout right”, they want to get money with absolute minimim of while minimizing the effort/funds spent (over time this ends up driving people who actually WANTED to invest the effort out of the company, degrading the quality of the product). Slapping brand-recognizing things into it is the result.  
Bethesda is not terrified. Bethesda is just lazy hacks threatened by competence, and developing anything legitimately interesting is effort.  

That is literally what majority of BoS chapters have had happen behind the scenes. Yes, they are this xenophobic (compare and contrast to IRL Japan aka “took nukes for them to STFU and surrender instead of throwing everyone to die against USA’s assault). Yes, this means they fucking die without less xenophobic leader or Deus Ex Machina dirigibles.  
@FeatherTrap  

Enjoy your DUST!
 
P.S. Trying to explain F3 in reasonable terms is futile. It’s dreamworks face-tier gamemaking on part of bethesda, literally “Uhhh, there’s things you know from real Fallout games there. And they all are fucking stupid”, there’s zero in-universe reason for West Coast stuff to be on the East Coast, it’s literally “we want to cut down on development costs and our offices are located on east coast so we don’t have to look how stuff is done on the other side of the country if we place our game in washington dc”.

@Barhandar  

 
Back in the days of Fallout 3? I disagree, I genuinely think they did back then.
 
Those days where so long ago now…before the drive for “muh wider audience”, before Fallout 76, before the Atomic Shop.
 

 
Again, repeating my point for me. That they became that is the essence of my complaint, they became a caricature of their own portrayal in Fallout 1. The game in which the brotherhood had the most valid point about the state of the wasteland, amazingly had more nuance and development then any portrayal of them since.
 

 
Maybe lift your eyes off the ground, take a look at my nice shiny tower and centre of economic growth that surrounds it.

@FeatherTrap  
BoS is divided by chapters that follow the individual leaders. F1/F2’s chapter is not the same as all other chapters.  

Ha ha no. What you’re observing is that bethesda’s dwindling levels of competence were not as low back then as they are today, their general drive was the same.  

Mmmm, tunnelers, raiders with access to nukes and ambushes to destroy your robot army and topple your tower, NCR disagreeing with your claim and bringing a real army there…

@Barhandar  
I can make the same point about Fallout 3’s chapter, thus invalidating the complaint about them.
 
They bought a niche IP that was not profitable to make money? Really, that’s the line you’re going with?  
See this is what I’m talking about when I say the internet kills nuance. The greediness of Bethseda now is being applied to a situation over a decade ago where it doesn’t make any sense.
 
Oh no, two nations already in collapse are going to send squishy men who can die against my limitless supply of soldiers that can be repaired from being absolutely disassembled? Not to mention creatures that can be killed by any asshole with a gun? Oh noooooo, whatever shall I dooooo? :/

@Barhandar  

Most of criticisms about Bethesda’s games and practices are correct, but I just can’t agree with this. Bethesda is a unique company in game development. If what Bethesda does were such an easy way to make money with minimum of effort, there would be countless imitators, like there are with every other massively sold game.

@Fleur de Lis  
As I pointed out, this criticism is valid about modern Bethesda. But I was talking about an older Bethesda, back in the days of Fallout 3. Where they bought a non-profitable IP with a niche audience and made a game that eagerly wanted to live up to it’s legacy (to the point of it being detrimental and stunting it’s potential, I might add). That piece of context is important here.

@FeatherTrap  
>what is Oblivion where features were stripped en-masse to make the game cheaper to produce  
>what is having large but limited number of securitrons at the bunker  
>what is not having manufacture facilities (or bunker stash wouldn’t be needed) for something as complicated meaning also no repair facilities capable of handling disassembly-level damage  
>what is digging under your structures, making them collapse with zero exposure to “assholes with guns” needed  
>what is player character being one man army where an average “asshole with a gun” gets butchered by even a single tunneler  
>what is seeing financial opportunity in buying a cheap IP then using brand recognition plus rose-colored glasses plus people forgetting about failures of Tactics and Vagrant Lands to generate a profit with minimal effort at revamping your slasher game into a shooter game  
@Fleur de Lis  
You need to start from a level of competence, that, for bethesda, being Morrowind. Trying to replicate their way of doing stuff while having no competence results in F76 - and I bet there are plenty of stillborn games who tried to do just that without the necessary momentum.  
It’s just that, without said momentum, the game is not only stillborn, but also will have no recognition - and hence no drama.
 
P.S. Also, the word is minimize effort, not minimum effort. The level of actual effort was still high, but corners were cut at every single opportunity, resulting in “why develop a story and antagonists when we can just steal water chip from F1 and Enclave from F2 and use supermutants - mind you, in F1 they’re intended to be “super” in intelligence as well, not just strength - as retarded berserker fodder enemies”.

@Fleur de Lis  
What sells their games is the modding community.
 
The lack of care and effort BGS puts into their product is documented. They have legacy bugs in FO76 that have existed in the engine since Morrowind. Considering that they recycled code from Skyrim to make FO76, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because they’ve been doing that since Morrowind.

@ANoobis  
Also yeah, this. You’d see a lot less success from Oblivion and F3 if mods weren’t possible to fix the fuckups, and is also why ES6 will likely get a pretty cold reception due to being owned by Micro “NO MODS ALLOWED COSMETICS ONLY” Soft.  

They’re literally using the same engine, Gamebryo. When the Gamebryo proper declared EOL, they’ve just filed the serial numbers off and called it “The Creation Engine”. There have been mods for Skyrim released immediately after the game went live, long before creation kit became accessible, because of having the same engine as Morrowind, Oblivion and F3.
 
The failure of F76 is also facilitated by it, as their take on Gamebryo is, uh, not suited for multiplayer all that well, and they’ve tried to replicate in a year what took modders way over a decade to have working reliably.

@Barhandar  

 
A continuation of Morrowind’s bastardisation of the Elder Scrolls franchise, from being a adventure in a real world you could get lost in to a romp through an elder scrolls theme park, with some nonsense fanfiction about giant brass mecha fights that break time forced into the setting.
 
Oh sorry, did people think Morrowind was above that? I’m still shocked at features that where in Daggerfall and taken out by Morrowind being added back in as “brand new features”.
 
Maybe they’ll add the ability to play your own character back into Elder Scrolls VI too. Been sorely missing that since Daggerfall.
 
 

 
What is building things? >.<  
You know, maybe people shouldn’t talk such smack about the Sole Survivor, apparently he has the superpower of building new things. Or I suppose in your world robots are manufactured by a long extinct species of flora.
 

 
What is a reasonable Fallout protagonist anymore?
 
 

 
What is forgetting the Fallout fan reaction to hearing the acquisition by Bethesda? What is forgetting how people where already declaring the game was terrible at that news alone, before they even began working on the fucking thing?

@Barhandar  

Well, you wrote “minimim”.

@Fleur de Lis  
I did? Lemme amend that.

I have my Castle Build here, still a work in progress but it’s looking good so far:
 

 
And oh my gooooooooosh, it has eaten through so much concrete…  
I’ve been collecting that grey-gold all game, and had not much to spend it on beyond the occasional reinforced structure and a couple of public pillories in every settlement. So that means, this build ate through almost an entire game’s worth of concrete… >.<

@FeatherTrap  
i remember running out of concrete trying to build a 3-floor vault

@TeamBlueplant  
Yeah, concrete goes fast…and that extension took a lot of it. >.<
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I wonder why modding for DOOM3 never took off as much as it did for OG DOOM1, Doom2, Duke Nukem 3D, BLOOD, Quake 1, Quake2, Quake 3 Arena, HL, Counterstrike, TF Classic, Unreal 98, UT99, and Minecraft? Both the Vanilla and BFG edition don’t have as big of an active a modding community as do the aforementioned games, even when looking at the PC and Mac versions. Damn, even FO 3, Fallout 4, the second EA Star Wars Battlefront game, SW: Empire at War, the Sims 3, as well as the Sims 4 have more active modding communities that are doing more!

@Absol95  
Because lower moddability AND lower quality + drastic genre shift that resulted in old community not being interested and new one being not attracted.